Boris Johnson's appointment as UK Foreign Secretary is likely to raise eyebrows after he blazed a trail of high-profile gaffes and controversies on the international stage.
It is just a few months since the blond Brexiteer-in-chief was criticised for describing US president Barack Obama as a "part-Kenyan" who harboured an "ancestral dislike" of Britain after he came out in favour of the Remain campaign.
He followed those remarks in The Sun in April by winning £1,000 in a competition run by the Spectator magazine the following month, describing Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan having sex with a goat and calling him a "wankerer".
Last November local officials called off a visit to Palestine on safety grounds after the then London mayor told an audience in Tel Aviv that a trade boycott of Israeli goods was "completely crazy".
The month previously he had made a more light-hearted gaffe when he was filmed wiping out a 10-year-old Japanese schoolboy during a game of street rugby on a visit to Tokyo.
In 2008 he apologised for a Daily Telegraph column written six years previously, while the MP for Henley, in which he described the Queen being greeted in Commonwealth countries by "flag-waving piccaninnies" - a derogatory term for black children.
The same column mentioned then Prime Minister Tony Blair being greeted by "tribal warriors who will all break out in watermelon smiles" on an upcoming visit to the Congo.
The same year he offended his hosts while visiting the Beijing Olympics, when he said it was a misconception that table tennis had been invented by the Chinese and had in fact developed from a Victorian English game called "whiff-whaff".
Labour MP Chuka Umunna, whose father was Nigerian, tweeted after Mr Johnson's new role was revealed, saying: "Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson's first official meeting with President Obama will be interesting. Suggest it starts with the word 'sorry'".
[attach id=519817 size="medium"]Hillary Clinton has a stare "like a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital," Mr Johnson once wrote. Photo: Reuters[/attach]
In another Daily Telegraph column, in November 2007, Johnson described Hillary Clinton, the democratic candidate to replace Obama, as having "a steely blue stare, like a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital".
The piece, which described Mrs Clinton as the best candidate to replace George W Bush in the 2008 presidential election, also described Obama as "plainly brilliant".